


Manifest Destiny

by Butterfly_Beat



Category: Fringe
Genre: Collection: Purimgifts Day 2, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-24
Updated: 2013-02-24
Packaged: 2017-12-03 11:14:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/697652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Butterfly_Beat/pseuds/Butterfly_Beat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Astrid always thought she’d be a paper-pusher when she grew up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Manifest Destiny

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jessalae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jessalae/gifts).



> Confession Time: I've been trying to get around to seeing the finale for Fringe for months now, and still haven't managed it. Given my slightly gap-y canon, I hope this still works.

Astrid always thought she’d be a paper-pusher when she grew up. Even before she knew that paperwork-as-a-job existed, she loved the idea of setting thoughts down so that she could play with them and reorganize them at will. She didn’t think about it as code-making until she was older. All she knew was that it was fun figuring out meanings from cases instead of word-placements when puzzling out sentences in Latin.

She’s smart. That’s something she’s always known, too. She saw connections her classmates couldn’t, and thanked any and every deity she even heard about that she had enough sense to keep her mouth shut most of the time. Computer code might be just another language for her, self-evident and easily parsed, but she saw how the rest of her classmates treated the computer geeks. She’d drawn enough odd looks when her mother died, there was no reason to add to the things that made her different than the other girls. Life was easier when she played up the similarities, instead.

College was freedom and knowledge and acceptance, right up until graduation came and the Real World became The Real World again. Grad school existed, and Astrid was no fool - of course it was the sensible option. All of her classmates were moving onto masters programs, so should she. But at the same time, Astrid knew herself just well enough to understand that academic politics would be her downfall, small details in faces and bodies that were never as clear as the written word or a glitching program.

So she struck out into the world of gainful employment, with a reference or two and a nudge toward federal employment. It turned out to be exactly what she’d dreamed about, all those years ago. Sifting through data and finding the truth, consolidating and reordering and placing it where it will do the most good.

That being said, Fringe Division generates the kinds of paperwork she could never have envisioned herself handling. Cover stories and sanitized explanations, takeout orders and carefully worded lease agreements. Search warrant applications for some of the most powerful entities in the corporate world, and forged documents in a world not their own.

It isn’t quite as tame as simple letters on a page, most days, but it just might use her brain the way it was truly meant for. That has to count for something, right?


End file.
